


A Legion Within

by cookinguptales



Category: Sleep No More - Punchdrunk
Genre: Bugs, Gen, a lot of bugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 23:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21261263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookinguptales/pseuds/cookinguptales
Summary: Boy Witch writhes, inside and out.





	A Legion Within

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Synergic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synergic/gifts).

> Written for your prompt, "There's a current Boy Witch whose performance is absolutely inhuman to me, and I love it. While I didn't actually nominate "bag of demons wearing Boy Witch like a fancy suit," as a separate character, I am so here for it."
> 
> I'll admit I haven't actually seen this Boy Witch, but boy did it give me ideas.

Blood and bone and graveyard dirt, scooped together and patted dry in the shape of a boy. Arcane herbs, still crawling with mites and beetles, made the heart of him.

He still feels them inside him some days. The tickle of a thousand tiny legs trying to find a way out. He feels them like fire in his blood, the stolen blood that suffuses him, and their itching, crawling confinement trickles down his spine. He feels it. The restlessness. The legion. They are inside of him. They control him. He controls them. They wrestle.

When she calls to them, the three of them, he feels as one. Three of them together create her heart, and the legs all march in cadence to its beat. They dance, they jerk, to a thrumming need to sink below, to rise above, to be one with the magic all around him and inside him and shaking him apart.

And then she is gone. But he is not alone. Never, never all alone. Never, never just himself. He staggers away, tries to scrub that tickling, nagging feeling from the underside of his skin, but he can’t. He is one and he is many and there is no cadence, no drumbeat for them to follow.

They pull him in a thousand directions at once, a thousand wills tearing to be free of his skin, trying to crawl up from the dirt that forms him like worms on a rainy day. His own damned fault for taking a shower. The water sings to the ants inside him, to the maggots and millipedes bursting to find freedom.

But the magic, her magic, binds them to him. “Him”, whatever he really can be. They are legion, all pushing for a turn behind his eyes, seeing the world, feeling it, smelling it, inhaling the magic that sustains and imprisons them all. And he is a witch. Her witch. Her magic given form. Imperfect form.

His fingers dance, his heartbeats dance, his atoms dance, to the cadence of the crickets in the night.


End file.
